About Arena

An Arena system comprises the following two main parts:

Back-end functionality - This may be a library, museum or archive system, with a public interface to the catalogues, user transactions such as loans and reservations, and Web 2.0 functions such as ratings, reviews and tags.
Information base system - This is where the authority may publish information and offerings to the public, as an alternative to the services at the physical institution; articles about what is happening at the library, tips about activities etc.

Arena builds these into a website that institutions may use to present themselves, make their services available on the Internet, and enable users to contribute additional information.

Liferay

Liferay is the content management system (CMS) used to carry Arena. Liferay is a portlet based CMS. It is an open source system based on the Java platform. Liferay in itself has a lot of functionality that can be used in the portal and added to this is the whole Arena functionality.

Portlets

A portlet is an independent function program. Portlets may be placed on a page in Arena, one or more times and also on many pages. A page is made up of several portlets that together form the complete information and/or transaction service provided by that page.

Arena’s default delivery setup includes a structure of pages and portlets that provide Arena’s essential services. You may add portlets to existing pages, and in general build the site to meet your requirements.

All portlets have some different sets of configuration:

Look and feel - Includes information like what title to show in different languages. Most settings related to styling are done by Axiell at the time of installation.
Configuration - Permissions to the portlet, and sharing of the portlet.
Arena preference setup - portlets also have setup related specifically to the functionality available in Arena. For each portlet there is a default setup of the preferences which is applied for each instance.

Language handling

Arena uses a language system that makes it possible for pages and portlets therein to work in different languages. By using this system, text, such as labels, headers and information displayed in pages and portlets will change automatically when a different language is selected by the user. This system also handles web content, such as articles, which may be available in different languages. This means that it is not necessary to have a set of pages and portlets in different languages – each language is handled automatically within each page and portlet.

Note:
Use the same URL for all language versions of a page.

For Arena portlets all texts are available in English (GB and US), Finnish, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), German and French. You may also apply your own text variants to replace the ones delivered. Liferay portlet texts are available in many languages, and are included in the Liferay bundle.

Styling

The general layout and styling of an Arena site is handled by using a theme. Each theme comprises a set of CSS. Each theme has a basic configuration that applies to all pages, including the page layout, column arrangement, colouring, and the header bar. The theme also controls menu handling.

A theme may exist in different colour schemes variants. Each colour scheme may include different colour selections and rules, but must conform to the same basic structure of the theme.